Vintage Bettie Page Star Sticker 🌟 Bunny Yeager Pin-Up Photo, 1990s-2000s NOS Die-Cut Decal

Who Photographed Bettie Page? 🌟 Vintage Bunny Yeager Pin-Up Star Sticker, 1990s-2000s NOS

Size: 4 1/2" x 4 1/2" ~ little to no wear

⭐ NOS Bettie Page star sticker — a pin-up photograph in bold red and orange, die-cut in the shape of a star with that swinging retro “Bettie Page” logo across the bottom. About 4 1/2" x 4 1/2". Unused old stock, bright color, sharp points — ready to stick or frame.

📸 The picture on it

It's Bettie looking back over her shoulder in a ruffled red bikini and long black gloves, set on a red and orange starburst. The whole thing is built like a badge: the photograph does the work in the middle, the star throws color out behind her, and the logo runs across the foot in fat orange bubble type. It is a small object designed to read from across a room.

🔍 What the sticker itself says — and does not

All it says is Bettie Page, with a little ™ right after Page. There's nothing else printed on it - no date, copyright, licensor, printer or country - and the back is plain white. That ™ is the tell: this is licensed merchandise, not 1950s material.

🗂️ Who published it, and exactly when

The sticker is silent - nothing printed on it names a publisher or a year. The closest catalog match is Dark Horse Deluxe's “Bettie Page Sticker: Bettie in Orange”, item number 13-429, released on 15 February 2006 at $2.50 and listed by Dark Horse at 4 1/2" x 4 1/4". The catalog described it as a delicious orange Bettie image on a cute star design, and you can't argue with that. Its companion sticker was number 13-428 - Bettie in her swimsuit against flowers - and Dark Horse pitched the two together as bright and flirty.

So it's licensed merchandise, not something from her modeling days - and at twenty years old it's become a collectible in its own right. It was made to be stuck onto something and thrown away. Most of them were.

⭐ Seven years, and then thirty of silence

Bettie Page only modeled for about seven years, 1950 to 1957, and in that time she became the most photographed pin-up of the day - Playmate of the Month in January 1955, jet-black bangs she trimmed herself, bikinis she sewed herself, and a grin that treated the camera like an old friend. That last part is why she outlasted every other model of the decade. Everybody else was posing at you. Bettie looked like she was enjoying herself.

Then she stopped, completely. She became an evangelical Christian, worked for church groups and stayed out of sight for decades, while her pictures kept getting reprinted, traded and pinned up by people who didn't even know if she was still living.

📷 The two photographers

Two names run through almost every Bettie Page story. In Manhattan, Irving Klaw photographed her on studio sets for his mail-order picture business, selling to camera clubs and catalog buyers. Bunny Yeager, a Miami model turned photographer, shot her outside in the Florida sun through 1954 - more than a thousand pictures at Miami Beach and the Africa USA park in Boca Raton, with Yeager sewing the outfits and making the props. The January 1955 Playboy centerfold came out of one of those Florida shoots, which made Yeager the first woman the magazine ever published as a photographer.

The picture on this star is one of Yeager's sunny Florida shots - the kind that made both of them famous. The sticker doesn't print her credit - licensed merchandise usually didn't - but the picture is hers all the same.

🚀 Why Bettie came back

What brought her back was not a re-release of her own work — it was an artist who could not let her go. From 1982, Dave Stevens drew the Rocketeer's girlfriend unmistakably as Bettie, and the 1991 film carried that face to an audience who had never heard her name and went looking for the original. Her burlesque films returned on videocassette in 1993. Licensed goods came along through the '90s and 2000s, and Dark Horse - which put out the third Rocketeer installment in 1995, collected the series, and holds licenses from both the Page and Stevens estates - was one of the biggest sources.

Put it all together: a model who quit in 1957, a cartoonist who couldn't stop drawing her in 1982, a movie in 1991, a revival - and a $2.50 die-cut star sticker that came out of it.

🕵️ The lore: nobody knew where she was

This is the part collectors still tell each other. For roughly two decades after she walked away, nobody in the outside world knew whether Bettie Page was alive. Her photographs were everywhere and she was nowhere, and the stories filled the gap: that she was living quietly in a trailer, that she had been killed in a car crash, that the mob had got her, that she had joined a convent. None of it was true and all of it got repeated, because the silence was so total that a rumor was the only thing anybody had. She was finally tracked down in the 1990s by people making a documentary about her. She gave the odd interview afterwards and signed autographs — and refused, absolutely, to be photographed as an older woman. She wanted the picture people had to stay the picture people had. The sticker in your hand is that decision, still holding.

🏢 Who Dark Horse are

Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson, out of his Oregon comic-shop chain Things From Another World, and built in Milwaukie, Oregon — a small town on the Willamette just south of Portland, about as far from the New York comics establishment as you can get and still be in the business. The publishing house is famous for what it did for creators' rights; Dark Horse Deluxe is its merchandise arm, the side of the company that turns a license into keychains, statues, lunchboxes and — here — a two-dollar-fifty sticker.

🏠 Small-format wall art

Pop it in a little frame, stand it on a shelf next to your records or tiki mugs, or stick it on a laptop, guitar case, toolbox or bar fridge. The star shape and the logo give you instant Bettie attitude in a small space, and the unused condition means it still feels crisp in the hand.

💋 Who this is for

Collectors of Bettie Page and of Playboy-era pin-up, Dark Horse Deluxe collectors filling in the Bettie sticker run, rockabilly and retro people, tattoo-flash collectors, and anyone who wants that silhouette and that color in a small, affordable piece.